@zeeglen - Was the first telegraph system digital or analog? Same question for teletype machines.

Recentlly I watched a BBC documentry on the CS Mackay-Bennett. The most famous ship you never heard of(*). CS stands for cable ship, This ship layed and mantained the transatlantic cable. What was interesting is that the cable used galvonic current for the signal. This was called left and right. Which came from the readout of the Mirror Galvanomiter. I looked this up on online sources and learned that resonate capacatance was used. The cable resistance too strong for just voltage. So my vote is for analog.

(*) in april of 1912 the ship was sent out to recue surviors of the Titanic disaster. They found 100s of bodies, too many to recover at one time.

Can anyone figure out what the circuit graphic at the beginning does? It could be a form of Colpitts oscillator, but the feedback phase looks wrong, and if a common-base configuration the transistor base has no decoupling. Or maybe the schematic is still in progress and not finished.

Or it could be an artistic graphic image that looks analog for illustration as to the article subject matter. Karen, any hints?

It is also a question of efficiency. I've seen people pull out huge, and very expensive, microcontrollers for things I could do with a single opamp because "digital is better". And lets not forget that analog controllers can be a lot quicker to respond to certain types of events than digital hardware. As always the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Another "lost art" is programming 4 bit microcontrollers, but when going for mass production consumer equipment shaving a cent or two of the microcontroller can have a huge impact. Eitherway, analog vs. digital is more of a cost efficiency and performance question in my opinion. And making that decision really depends on the circuit designer's skill and experience.

I don't think this is true anymore @Askskibum (used to be for the last 30 years or so)...less ASICs designs per year, more FPGAs, IP licensing, higher levels of integrations, smaller number of companies => less analog design needed!

I find the very question posed in the title of the article to be shocking. Experienced analog IC designers have been in demand for about as long as I can remember. Mixed-signal skills are even better. What seems to be less in demand is pure digital design skills -- meaning it digital is all that you can do, you're at a disadvantage.